One Response to “Georgia on Their Minds”

1. lester says:

   February 7, 2009 at 6:08 pm

   okay, convince me.
2. chuck martel says:

   February 7, 2009 at 6:13 pm

   Who knows how much synapse activity I wasted reading that?
3. lester says:

   February 7, 2009 at 6:17 pm

   our middle east policy is an expensive useless government program that does more harm than good.
4. Moshe Aharon says:

   February 7, 2009 at 6:55 pm

   This poll highlights the timeliness and value of President Obama’s vision for peace and mutual respect among peoples and religious groups. Symmetries among competing narratives, so eloquently described last summer by then-candidate Obama, underlie his approach to American diplomacy. Universal values and human rights have never been so central to American strategic thinking since the Carter Administration. The Obama Doctrine, coming into focus with each passing week, can only enhance understanding of both American and Israeli culture within a framework of mutual respect for the aspirations of all peoples. Respect for the common future of mankind also promises to frame President Obama’s plan for economic recovery in the context of the long-term sustainability of the environment amidst climate change and our dying oceans. Israeli green technologies will provide moral and technological leadership, not only with respect to carbon-based fuels but also in relation to the growing threat of obesity and diets deficient in green vegetables. These key points are consistently under-emphasized by the bloggers of Commentary. In these tumultuous times we can ill-afford cliches and muddled thinking.
5. Watchman says:

   February 7, 2009 at 7:04 pm

   Guess which country won the poll?
6. Peter Shalen says:

   February 7, 2009 at 7:07 pm

   chuck martel #2: Where the synapse, there nap I.
7. Ritchie Emmons says:

   February 7, 2009 at 7:23 pm

   Moshe #4 – HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
8. Tom Paine says:

   February 7, 2009 at 8:37 pm

   Moshe, (Re #4):

   Please tell us that was satire.

   It was far too subtle for print.
9. H5N1 says:

   February 7, 2009 at 8:40 pm

   Did you type that with a straight face, Moshe?

   Just be sure to keep Mr. Obama away from the Kryptonite, then, eh?

   (Because, apparently, it’s the only thing that could possibly prevent the newly-elected president from realizing his grandiose vision of an all-encompassing, post-party political, carbon-free utopia.)

   Yes, I look forward to it.
10. g says:

    February 7, 2009 at 8:47 pm

    Moishele, sign me up. I need more green veggies.
11. Joe says:

    February 7, 2009 at 11:12 pm

    Well we will get tired dealing with it, and then something will wake us up. Let’s hope it is not too late.
12. Stuart Rose says:

    February 7, 2009 at 11:44 pm

    One revealing thing about these polls is how hypocritical so many people around the world are when they denounce the U.S. for being arrogant and disrespectful of other countries.
    Here we have masses of Europeans uninterested in the suffering of the Iranian people over 30 years of a brutal theocracy and about all of the murder and mayhem this regime has spread.
    Of course, the contempt for Israel is appalling, even more so for being a part of the furniture of the mentality of many Europeans for probably close to two decades now.
13. Dan says:

    February 8, 2009 at 1:50 am

    Yes, that’s the truth, the whole world is sick to death of dealing with the problems of the Jews.

    But they’re mistaken, and mistaken badly, tragically, if they think Tehran going nuke is exclusively a concern of Jews.

    Israel needs to use this.

    What Israel should do is simply state to the world at large: “None of you gives a damn what happens, just so long as it doesn’t happen to you, and just so long as it doesn’t disturb your pathetic, miserable existences, that being the case, ———– we’re unloading on Iran, and we’re unloading in the only way that will assure we take care of Tehran’s atomic delusions.”

    USE IT.

    The world really wants the problem to just go away, BUT they don’t want to get their hands dirty making it go away. They want it to disappear, just disappear.

    So make the regime disappear.

    Neutrons.

    Neutrons are what the doctor ordered.

    It needs to be absolutely understood the the Iranian program is so scattered, so hardened, so buried, that it’s impervious to conventional air attack.

    That’s not my opinion.

    That’s the considered opinion of some guys and some groups, whose job it has been to make that type of assesment.

    The situation has now developed to the point that absent nuclear weaponry, Tehran’s program can’t be stopped.

    The world, the whole damn world is sick to death of hearing about the Mideast.

    Which means Israel is either going to seize that as a golden incentive to act, and to act decisively, ——– or Israel is going to be totally isolated, and thrown to the wolves.
14. Yehudit says:

    February 8, 2009 at 3:03 am

    Iran can reach Europe now with its ballistic missiles, right? If Iran closes the Straits of Hormuz, energy costs all over the globe will be affected, right? I mean, they don’t have to care about Israel to be concerned about Iran.
15. Barry Meislin says:

    February 8, 2009 at 4:33 am

    Of course, the beauty of the Iranian position is that when they do close the Straits of Hormuz, they will do so because (they will say) of Israel and/or the US.

    And the world will buy it.
16. John H. McCloskey says:

    February 8, 2009 at 5:52 am

    Considered supply-side, all political polling — apart from “If the election were held today … X or Y?” — is nonsense, and “13,575 in-home or telephone interviews conducted across a total of 21 countries … between 21 November 2008 and 1 February 2009″ is nonsense on stilts.

    For social-scientisers in white labóratory coats to ask their patients about matters not actually under the patients’ control is to invite vast oceans of unconsidered and inconsiderable hot air. Even as entertainment, polling is, or ought to be, obsolescent now that everybody has factional _blogghiatura_ like for instance to read instead.

    And what remains to laugh at in “a total of 21 countries” after pointing out that in any list of twenty-one (or 221) countries, at least nineteen (or 219) must be irrelevant nowheresvilles strung out from China to Peru. In all the world, there is but Hyperzion and our own dear holy Homeland™, after all, that really signify. Everybody knows that. (Everybody around here. Everybody important. Neocomrade #13 knows it especially well, no doubt, yet he is only knowin’ better than most what all alike know well enough.)

    Still on the supply side, the chief fiend hired by the Beeb [*] is a sad case of China-Peru fixation, “Our poll results suggest that China has much to learn about winning hearts and minds in the world. It seems that a successful Olympic Games has not been enough to offset other concerns that people have. As for Russia, the more it acts like the old Soviet Union, the less people outside its borders seem to like it.”

    Demandsidewise, one is tempted to apply the _cui bono?_ and guess that either the _Bundeskanzlerin_ in particular or else somebody at Brussels put the BBC fiends up to it:

    “We love EU, we truly do!
    When EU’re not with us, we’re blue!”

    It will also presumably have helped that the monsters of theohypocrisy got five homelands to everybody else’s one. So easy for Alphonse and Gaston to vote for Hans and Fritz, and vice versa! The social-scientisers scrupulously note that what they call “the United Kingdom” this time was called “Great Britain” previously, but they do not tell us whether the patient was permitted to boost/knock her own country (or Union).

    Should GlobeScan ever call me up, I will attempt to vote for NAFTA, of course, the alone focus of True Civilisation (a.k.a. Absolute Free Trade) in our alien and bewildered world. Everybody knows that.

    Happy days.

    ___
    [*] “GlobeScan Chairman Doug Miller” Cf. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/06_02_09bbcworldservicepoll.pdf

    Neocomrade #12, by the way, knows wrong that “Here we have masses of Europeans uninterested.” Even if one does not take a high-and-dry Huntin’tonian Clashist view of where Europe is (and so exclude the flaming barbarians of Turkey and Russia and Latin America), the Beijing-Lima Axis outnumbers us Little Friends of Dr. Johnson two-to-one. Or rather, fourteen-to-seven. Aligned with the holy Homeland™ (though negligible in themselves) stand Canada, Airstrip One, the Fifth Reich, the Fifth Republic, Spain and Italy. All the rest are virtual Goths and Vandals and Zulus and Bantus.

    One might commend Neocomrade #12 for his ‘uninterested’, which would express my own fundamental objection to this form of Applied Soc. Sci. — if it stood alone. However when expanded to “uninterested in the suffering of the Iranian people over 30 years of a brutal theocracy” &c. &c., it creates a different impression, chiefly that the neocomrade wishes he had commissioned the poll himself and told Mr. Miller what tune to pipe.

    Doubtless #12 can obtain a suitable product if he cares to invest in it, a product from which a sane person might really be able to infer the ‘hypocrisy’ of ‘Europeans’ vis-à-vis the evil Qommies. Naturally that would be garbage too, by my lights, insofar as none of the unmasked hypocrites makes Old Euro foreign policy and scarcely one in a hundred thousand can have spent enough time worrying about “brutal theocracy” to have an opinion worth crossing the street to hear.

    But God knows best.
17. Alexander Almasov says:

    February 8, 2009 at 7:13 am

    16: Man, that ol’ ersatz Bushmill’s shore has some weird aftereffects. As for “lights”: that’s as in viscera, right?
18. Seth Halpern says:

    February 8, 2009 at 9:00 am

    Again I tend to agree with McCloskey despite said aftereffects and his you’re-all-fools-but-it’s-useless-to-really-complain-about-it-ism: Most people’s opinions of matters that don’t concentrate their minds are worthless. That goes for most politicians, too, btw, who tend not to care what their publics think unless it affects their own tenure. Still, I have to ask: Moshe, that was such good parody, are you sure you didn’t write McCloskey’s comment too?
19. Stuart Koehl says:

    February 8, 2009 at 9:15 am

    “The world community is so sick and tired of dealing with problems originating in the Middle East that they’re just about ready to quit trying solving them. ”

    That would probably be the best thing all around. At least there would be clear cut winners and losers, instead of the perpetual festering boil we have now. Given the correlation of forces, the main winner would be Israel, which, if pushed, has the military capability to defeat all of the Arab states surrounding it, as well as forcing the expulsion of irreconcilable Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. Won’t be pretty, but it will be final.
20. Stuart Koehl says:

    February 8, 2009 at 9:17 am

    >>>Universal values and human rights have never been so central to American strategic thinking since the Carter Administration.<<<

    Which is why Obama is intent on kissing the ass of every tin-pot tyrant in the region, tossing human rights advocates and fledgling democracies under the bus with the rest of the inconvenient baggage?
21. chuck martel says:

    February 8, 2009 at 6:15 pm

    According to my favorite lady Caroline Glick, in the Jerusalem Post:

    According to a report in Aviation News, last week the US Navy prevented Israel from seizing an Iranian weapons ship in the Red Sea suspected of carrying illicit munitions bound for either Gaza or Lebanon. A week and a half ago, the US Navy boarded the ship in the Gulf of Aden and carried out a cursory inspection. It demurred from seizing the ship, however, because, as Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained on January 27, the US believed it had no international legal right to seize the vessel.

    In inspecting the ship the US was operating under UN Security Council Resolution 1747, which bars Iran from exporting arms. The US argued that it lacked authority to seize the ship because 1747 has no enforcement mechanism. Yet the fact of the matter is that if the US were truly interested in intercepting the ship and preventing the arms from arriving at their destination, the language of 1747 is vague enough to support such a seizure.

    And that’s the point. The US was uninterested in seizing the ship because it was uninterested in provoking a confrontation with Teheran, which it seeks to engage. It was not due to lack of legal authority that the US reportedly prevented the Israel Navy from seizing the ship in the Red Sea, but due to the administration’s fervent wish to appease the mullahs.